I read 163 novels and these are the six best: Mary Beard on judging the Booker prize

As a Booker judge, I think I have worked harder than I have ever done before. Reading 163 novels in six months, making careful assessments, being ready to argue for your judgment, going back to check you haven’t got it wrong … in some ways it took more energy than actually writing a book. But it was also hugely rewarding and fun. I shall never forget the discussions in our regular judging meetings, and the pleasure of discovering how we had sometimes reached almost exactly the same view of a book, and sometimes dramatically diverged. There were no big newsworthy squabbles, but a lot of discussion, a lot of listening and re-reading.

When each new batch of 30 or so novels arrived at home, through the spring, I plunged in and picked them out at random (only occasionally cheating by selecting a slim volume when I felt I needed to get my total up!) But so that you have more to go on, here is a quick guide to each of the books on the shortlist – in strictly alphabetical order.

In M John Harrison’s The End of Everything, we enter the dystopian world of Kent, sometime in the near future. There’s been a catastrophe of some undefined sort and the survivors have been reduced to scavenging and “making do” after most of the rules of social order have collapsed. Expect an unexpected random shooting or two, and an alien visitor to be managed. But the book is not (just) weird. It is also about us and about now – a gripping read and often funny in the most surprising places. If you can’t always make out exactly what is going on, that’s part of the point.

Also with the hallmarks of dystopia, but inspired by a rumoured real-life violent incident in Jamaica in the 1980s, Marlon James’s The Disappearers explores a vicious killing and its long, unsettling aftermath. While rehearsing for a play, some gay men are attacked by homophobic thugs: one actor is left dead; another has both eyes gouged out; all are scarred in different ways. Later one of the survivors sets out to find the others and reckon with what happened. A hugely ambitious novel, it is told over different times, in different voices and registers (diary extracts, media interviews etc). The characters stick in your head, the wit is sharp, the rawness unforgettable.

In contrast, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag starts from an hilarious premise. A struggling actor takes a job in a university psychology department, where he must attend classes dressed in a black leather bag. This is based on a real-life experiment from the 1960s, which aimed to discover how the other students would react to the “bag man” in their midst. Beyond its surreal humour, which will have you laughing out loud even on a second read, Black Bag raises big questions about identity, ambition and human frailty, as well as conjuring up some truly absurd sex scenes (in the bag, of course).

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry has its surreal aspects, too. The narrator, a self-effacing museum curator, specialises in re-creating historical tableaux, with horribly accurate fake fruit and plastic joints of meat. During one assignment, the curator uncovers the story of a forgotten medieval king, trapped in a treacherous court – a reluctant and unsuitable occupant of the throne who came to power as the last option after the death of his brothers. Perry elegantly intertwines present and past to question the boundary between history and fiction, and to ask whether the past can ever be a safe refuge from the here-and-now.

Artie Dam, in Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, has no safe refuge anywhere. A much-loved, fiftysomething history teacher in an American high school, who likes messing about in boats, Dam sees his apparently comfortable world gradually collapse. We find him with thoughts of suicide, trying out shoplifting in a bout of madness, facing a new US president – and weighed down by the discovery of an almost unbearable family secret. This is a seductively understated book, which unpicks the silences and shame of family life, while also unpicking the new world of Trump’s America, without ever once haranguing the reader.

Silences and shame also underlie John of John by Douglas Stuart. Here a student – at the end of his course and with no job – returns “home” to the tiny Hebridean island of Harris. Stuart paints the island landscape vividly, but it’s far from the romantic, untouched world of the tourist brochures and it’s a disconcerting sort of home. This is a world of violence, feuds, discontent, hypocrisy, secret sex and isolation that is not only geographic. Yet there is a rough tenderness in the story that Stuart weaves, as well as tremendous emotional depth, and in the end, almost unbelievably, a sense of hope.

Each of these books can change how you see the world. So, plunge in and enjoy the ride.

• Explore the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize and, for a limited time, get all six books for only £79 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.